Among several Brazilian startups that have recently attracted worldwide attention, Pipefy stands out for pioneering the global-first way of doing business in the region. Founded in Curitiba in 2015, and with more than 90% of its workforce based in Brazil, the company has clients in more than 140 countries and was named Endeavor’s fastest-growing startup in 2020. As a company with a strong local presence and a wide-ranging global outlook, Pipefy is, in many ways, a perfect expression of Valor’s cross-border operating and investing mindset.
Pipefy’s global reach is driven, first and foremost, by its product-centric approach to doing business. The company was born out of a simple, yet powerful insight: business teams lack the tools to automate key processes in an autonomous, no-code manner. As a consequence, process automation inside enterprises is, by default, a top-down initiative that requires full buy-in from top-level management and extensive deployment of internal IT resources. Pipefy is flipping the model on its head by empowering individuals to build automations and manage processes from customer onboarding, to performance evaluations, accounts receivable management, and software bug tracking. The applications are wide-ranging and fully customizable, which allows users to create models never built before. By democratizing access to software tools, Pipefy is quickly becoming the next-generation operational system for builders inside companies.
We first met Alessio when he was building Acessozero, a services marketplace that he sold to Apontador.com after reaching the 1-million-users milestone. When Alessio came to us with the idea for Pipefy in 2015, his global vision for the company immediately resonated with our investing principles. Not only did Alessio have a clear strategy to tackle a space dominated by established incumbents and well-funded upstarts, he also had, as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, the necessary tactical insights into lean management and business processes management to build a killer product. We immediately decided to lead Pipefy’s seed round and became the first institutional investors to support Alessio on his journey to become a global leader in business process management.
Fast forward 5 years and Pipefy has not disappointed. The company is now trusted by doers in more than 14,000 companies worldwide and its performance attracted IVP, one of the leading global enterprise SaaS investors, to lead its Series B in 2019. With a decentralized team and offices in San Francisco, Austin, and Curitiba, Pipefy is perfectly positioned to further its global reach. More than ever, companies are being forced to rethink operations in a remote-first world and Pipefy is yet again the go-to enabler of grassroots innovation and efficiency for remote teams. Pipefy has set a high bar for Brazilian companies and shown that global reach is within their grasp. We couldn’t be prouder of Alessio and the team and hope that their example inspires many Brazilian founders to follow the same path!
